Caine's Law

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  Even this Gayle takes with only a thoughtful nod. “Administrator Kollberg is not a … representative example. The events surrounding his breakdown left his mind, ah, fragile. Exceedingly fragile.”

  “It wasn’t too sturdy before.”

  “The belief was that his expertise in Studio operations, and intimate acquaintance with your career, would on balance make him an asset. But—” He turns up his hands. “—everyone makes mistakes, yes?”

  I turn the switch over in my hand. I imagine my face must look like I’m holding a handful of radioactive weasel shit. “The more I think about this, the more I’m liking the slavery-and-execution option.”

  Gayle nods to this too, with a tiny sigh of regret. “Professional Faller, if you don’t mind—?”

  “This is … the rest of their offer.” Faller’s grey as his suit. Dark swipes underline his eyes like smears of dried blood. He touches a control surface on the palmpad’s casing. “Look at this.”

  The screen changes. At first I can’t make sense of it. A tangle of tubes and wires go into and out from some kind of mannequin, a Halloween decoration–looking thing, a plastic ghoul, shriveled and corpse-white, hairless parchment skin glued over jutting bones, empty eye sockets sprouting twists of cable like fiber-optic tears. “So?”

  “Look again. It’s not easy to see,” he says faintly. “Because … well, you don’t want to, you follow?”

  I look again. After a second or two, I catch motion: the image isn’t a still—faint color-shifts flow along a tube here or there, and the white plastic eye sockets … twitch … the echo of a blink pressing flesh around the cables …

  Acid creeps up the back of my throat. “It’s alive.”

  “Yes.”

  “What the fuck is this thing?”

  “It’s a Worker.”

  “Yeah?” Workers aren’t good for anything complex; the cyborging shorts out higher brain function. “What kind of work does anybody get out of that?”

  “Data processing.” Faller’s voice goes thick, like he’s trying not to gag. “I was told that … this unit … is part of the Social Police signal-filter complex.”

  My mouth’s so dry I can’t even swallow the up-trickle of acid. “This is the stick, huh? Wire me up so I don’t have a choice?”

  “It’s worse than that. Michaelson … Hari …” Faller’s voice falls like he’s praying. Maybe he is.

  Maybe his god is kinder than mine.

  “You’re still not seeing. Because … because like I said, you don’t want to. It’s your mind, not your eyes.”

  “What, some kind of, whateverthefuck, psychological defense mechanism or some fucking thing? Because if I ever had any, they broke a long time ago. Burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp.”

  No answer. No response at all. The face on the screen …

  There’s something about the way the hairless brow arches down to join the cheekbone … if those wires weren’t in the way, I would have seen it already. This Worker used to be somebody I know.

  It’s not all that easy to pick out a face, not when it’s somebody dead. Who you think is dead. Someone whose head’s been shaved, even the eyebrows and eyelashes. Somebody whose flesh has melted away with age and starvation and whose eyes have been ripped out to make room for cables, and my fingers go numb and my legs, they go numb too and their weight drags at me, hauls me down through the bed, through the deck, freefall into the earth. Into the bedrock. “Him? That’s him? That?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  When the Social Police came for him the final time, that night at the Abbey … standing on the marble threshold of my marble archway, helpless in the moonlight, watching them load him into the back of a detention van on my front lawn …

  No good-byes. The digivoder that had been his only voice lay in pieces on the floor beside his bed, crushed under a soapy’s boot heel … His nurse at my shoulder … I remember asking, faintly, my lips numb and clumsy—

  How long do you think he has?

  Bradlee Wing, faithful Bradlee, who I haven’t thought of in forever, maybe not since that same night—He probably won’t even survive the cyborg conversion.

  Yeah.

  If he survives the operation, though … they’ll probably hardwire him for data processing. He might live for years.

  One apologetic cough.

  Not that you’d, uh, want him to, y’know. Not like that …

  Out on my lawn, in the grip of the Social Police, he had rolled his head toward me. He had lifted his twisted hand—his last voluntary function, not quite destroyed by his disease—and he had touched his head, and made a weak patting motion, and then walked his crippled fingers slowly up the chrome bedrail of his travel couch. The last thing he ever said to me.

  Keep your head down, and inch toward daylight.

  He hadn’t kept his down far enough, and now wires come out of his eye sockets.

  “He’s alive. Sort of,” I murmur, numb and stupid, knocked flat sideways by the way shit seems to come at me from all over at once.

  “Oh yes,” Gayle says. “I have been instructed to emphasize to you that the network into which he is wired is the Social Police global data mine—that his brain is being used to filter electronic chatter and flag potentially seditious communications.”

  This time I can’t make my mouth form my fading mental echo of holy shit …

  Using Dad to track down everybody who is anything like what he used to be. It takes my fucking breath away. It’s like Raithe. Like Raithe and Shanna. Worse.

  It’s a stroke of evil motherfucking genius.

  Gayle nods as if he can read my mind. “You should understand that the ingenuity of their malice is functionally infinite.”

  I don’t answer. I can’t answer.

  “While surrender is painful and humiliating, refusal will be worse,” Gayle says. “Do you understand? They know your, ah, your absolute. Your obligation of manhood. And they are willing to use it in any necessary way.”

  This pulls me back up to the surface of the swamp in my head. “So, what, if I screw with them, they kill him? Some threat.”

  “No. If you don’t cooperate …” He looks at me then, and his eyes go as dead as mine feel. “If you screw with them, they won’t kill him.”

  Oh. Of course.

  That makes more sense.

  “In fact,” Gayle says gently, almost delicately, just like Vinson Garrette, “they’ll wake him up.”

  Sure. What else?

  Didn’t matter. None of it mattered. None of it changed anything at all. Except …

  Dad.

  Of course Dad. It’s always been Dad. How could I think it would ever be anyone or anything else? He was right: I am defined by fear.

  My fear is him.

  Not fear of him—I got over that before I was ten years old. Fear I might be him. Sick. Crazy. Locked inside a body that doesn’t belong to me anymore.

  Alone with my rage.

  Maybe that’s why I never gave a shit about tossing my life into whatever the next fight was. Is.

  People who say there’s no such thing as a fate worse than death should try telling that to Dad. I don’t know if his ears still work, but if they don’t you’re out of luck. It’s not like you can draw him a fucking picture.

  Funny how they understand me so well.

  I take a deep breath. “Okay.”

  Faller blinks. “What?”

  “I said okay. Need me to spell it? Here, watch.”

  I jam my thumb onto the switch. Black oil rolls down toward my feeding tube.

  It doesn’t feel like anything at all.

  “Hey, I’ve got one last question.” I look from Faller to Gayle and back again. “Who’s your favorite character in To Kill a Mockingbird?”

  “I have this dream, y’know? More like a fantasy. That once, just once, somebody I care about is in trouble, and when I show up to help, they’re actually happy to see me.”

  — DOMINIC SHADE


  Caine Black Knife

  He walks through a universe of white.

  Snow …

  He can’t remember the last time he saw snow.

  It falls gently as a child’s kiss. Flakes twist and tumble and alight with the hushy whisper of raindrops on tiptoe. With each footstep, he feels a crunch too discreetly crisp to make sound.

  He feels this crunch because his feet are bare. His legs as well, and groin and chest and head—entirely naked—yet he feels no chill at all. A dream, then. He understands how this works. No matter how cold this landscape, he’s warm in bed somewhere entirely else.

  Obviously a dream. It’s been more than twenty years since he last could walk.

  He might so easily lose himself in the glorious play of muscle and bone and blood and breath, but he’s dreamed of walking for years; he can’t pretend he doesn’t know what waking will inflict.

  He’s been walking a long time, and has come very far. How long and how far is, in the way of dreams, impossible to know, but now a shadow looms in the white before him and becomes a silhouette—a cottage-size round with a conical top.

  His experienced eye automatically identifies it: a yurt, too tall and the roof too steeply pitched for Mongolian, and as he approaches it comes clearer and he nods to himself. More west-central Asian, Khazakh perhaps: lucky. His graduate study had required a thorough grounding in Old Turkic and its linguistic descendants; he can make himself understood to speakers of more than a dozen north-central Asian languages, from Altay to Uyghur, while the Mongolic group always seemed to trip him up.

  The yurt rotates, or he circles it; either way, he understands that this has been his destination all along.

  To end something, or begin something, or both.

  The entryway moves into view, and night has fallen without his noting the change. Now his only light is sanguine fireglow leaking through a gap in the layered felt. Not Khazakh after all; no upland nomad would be so careless with his home’s warmth on a night such as this.

  He discovers he’s looking forward to seeing who’s within.

  He draws breath to announce himself, but hesitates, obscurely embarrassed to speak before he knows what language is appropriate. So instead he reaches for the thin slice of light; the interior furnishings will tell him everything he needs to know.

  “You can’t go in.”

  He stops, frowning. The voice had been low, a flatly affectless growl, close behind his shoulder, but he doesn’t startle. The frown deepens. He hadn’t startled because he’d already known he was not alone.

  Slowly he turns toward the infinite night. “You speak English.”

  “So do you.” A shadow assembles itself from the darkness. “Come over by the fire.”

  The shadow shifts to his left. Beyond it now he sees what had limned this silhouette: a small fire within a ring of stones, beneath a hide canopy to shield it against the snow.

  “I apologize,” he says. “I did not intend to trespass on your land, nor to presume upon your hospitality, nor to give offense of any sort.”

  “You haven’t.” A shadow backhand lazily waves in the yurt’s direction. “That’s your place.”

  “Mine?” Again he frowns, as he considers this; it seems he had somehow known that too. “Then why can’t I go in?”

  “Because I said so. Come on.” The shadow beckons him toward the fire. “Put on your clothes.”

  “I’m not cold.”

  “Clothes aren’t just for warmth.”

  Under the canopy—bison hide laced together with leather thongs, he notes automatically without stopping to wonder at how this came to be when bison have been extinct for more than a century—he finds a small rack improvised of sunbleached ribs and thigh bones bound together with sinew, and on the rack hang a wool serape and breeches. Nearby are tough, well-worn leather boots.

  As he clothes himself, he speaks with his face toward the fire. “Do I know you?”

  “You think you do.”

  “Your voice seems familiar.”

  “It would.”

  The soft prickle of the fire-warmed wool against his skin is the most exquisite sensation he can remember ever having felt. “Thank you. I get tired of being naked.”

  “Everybody does.”

  Another pair of bone racks support a long spit above the flames. “Is there food?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  He gives this question solemn consideration. “No. But I think I will be.”

  “When you’re hungry, there’ll be food.”

  He nods. “Where are we? What is this place?”

  “Complicated.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “You say that like it’s been a long time.”

  The shadow nods abstracted agreement. “Mostly forever.”

  “Will you come to the fire? I know your voice. I know I know your voice. But somehow I need to see you.”

  “Sit down.”

  “What?”

  “Sit down. Right where you are.”

  He looks down. A thick pile of skins and pelts lies at his feet. “All right,” he says, and sits.

  “That’s your side.” A form gathers itself from snow and night. “This is my side. You’re not allowed on my side. I won’t come onto yours.”

  He finds himself nodding. “So there are rules.”

  “There are always rules.”

  “All right. Good. Figuring out rules is what I do.”

  “Not anymore.”

  The form reaches firelight beneath the canopy and the strange place and strange clothing and the white in the man’s hair and beard mean nothing at all because the face is one he knows better than he knows his own. “Hari!”

  He lurches to his feet, to lunge across the flames and gather his son into his arms. “Hari, my God—!”

  “Don’t.”

  “But—”

  “Rules.” His voice is dark and flat and promises to match the death behind his eyes. “Look at what’s between us.”

  He follows the gesture, and squints down at the spit over the campfire. Unlike anything else he has found in this place, it’s not stone nor bone nor any other natural thing.

  It’s a sword.

  Long and black and lethal, lacking art, lacking grace, lacking beauty: a purely functional tool for killing. “What the hell—?”

  “Touch the pommel. Don’t pick it up. Touch it.”

  He does—gingerly, because the blade has been licked by the campfire flames for an unknown span, and thus might be hot enough for third-degree burns, but it does not burn his fingers and wonder blossoms within him. “It’s not even warm …”

  More than that: it trickles ice into his veins and up his spine and now, finally, fully dressed and standing before a crackling fire, he feels the cold.

  “I’m on this side. You’re on that side. The sword stays between us.”

  “Until when?”

  “Until I pick it up.”

  He shakes his head, baffled. “Help me out a little, Killer. This all—”

  “Don’t.” The word comes out flat and hard and final as the chop of an axe into oak. The scar across his nose flares red as blood. Bad temper runs in his family. “Don’t call me that. Ever.”

  He goes still. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “My father called me Killer.”

  “But Hari, I am your—”

  “My father’s dead. Your son, your Hari, is … somebody else. If he exists at all.”

  “All right. Just calm down, all right? We’ll sit, can we?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sorry.” A long slow breath and a lowered head. “This isn’t exactly easy for me either.”

  The two men seated themselves on opposite sides of the fire, the sword of black ice between them. “So what should I call you? Is it all right if I call you Hari?”

  “I’ve been going by Jonathan Fi
st. Deals I make turn out badly.”

  “Jonathan …” he murmurs slowly, squinting, because he should recognize it … and then he catches the pun and it lights him up and sparks a grin. “Oh. Jonathan Fist. Nice.”

  “Should have figured if anybody’d get it, it’d be you.”

  “We read it together. Remember?”

  “I read it with my dad.”

  “Is that a meaningful distinction?”

  “If I say it is.”

  “Stubborn child. What, then? Am I your Mephistopheles?”

  “More like the other way around.”

  “Oh, please. A rhetorical inversion so obvious barely rises even to the level of trite—and your carefully cultivated Outlaw Loner persona may impress the tourists, but remember who you’re talking to.”

  “Stop. Just stop. This isn’t anthropology.”

  “Are you sure?” He offers a preparatory chuckle. “You know what anthropology is?”

  “Whatever an anthropologist says it is, yeah, I remember. But I didn’t hear it from you.”

  He settles comfortably into his pallet of skins. Here and now he is as happy as he has ever been. He regrets only that eventually he’ll wake up. “If I’m not your father, who am I?”

  The other inclines his head just enough to send a skeptical look through the fringe of his eyebrows. “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know. What year is this?”

  “It’s not. How old do you remember being?”

  He shrugs. “I remember my seventy-fifth birthday. The autographed Twain. I remember you reading to me.”

  “Look at your hands.”

  He doesn’t bother. “Hari, being able to walk was clue enough. I only hope I remember this when I wake up—the imagery suggests a complexity of Jungian ideation I’ve never even—”

  “You won’t wake up. It’s not a dream.”

  He chuckles tolerantly. “Of course you’d say so.”

  “And I do.”

  “You say I’m dead. Is this then some style of afterlife?”

  “I said my father’s dead.”

  “Ah, I see. I’m not him. Some comfort in that, I suppose. This is a bit bleak to be Heaven, and one assumes, pacé Sartre, Hell to be—”

  “Look, I’ll call you Duncan.” He looks down at his own hands then, and muscle bunches along his jaw. “I guess you should call me Caine.”